1. Your employees are your brand.

Your reputation is in their hands. And yet, internal communications are only given a fraction of the budget and attention of external communications. What’s up with that?

2. An employee who’s stopped caring can cost you dearly

In the USA, companies lose an estimated $350 billion in productivity every year because of unhappy employees. And around 68 per cent of customers take their business elsewhere because of bad or indifferent service.

3. Language matters

Almost all the speakers, whatever their specialist topic, stressed the importance of speaking to your people like, you know, people. Be honest and straightforward in your internal communications, using language everyone can understand and relate to, even when it’s bad news.

4. So does storytelling

‘Storytelling’ might have become a marketing buzzword, but there’s science behind its effectiveness. So why limit it to your big, flashy external campaigns? At Intel, there’s a team doing ‘internal content marketing’, which means they find and write stories that make people proud to be part of the company. And The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago has based an entire internal campaign on employees’ personal stories, making its own people not just fans but also cheerleaders.

5. And don’t forget employee-to-employee communications

When we hear ‘internal communications’, most of us probably think of those emails, posters and policies where it’s the employer speaking to the people. But how employees write to each other is important too. Change that, and you could see a change in your entire culture.

I spoke at a conference about customer experience the other week, and, like most conferences I go to, I heard a few brilliant thoughts that really got me thinking. But let’s not talk about those.

Let’s talk about the drivel that most people produce. If you’re presenting at one of these conferences, here are five things to think about to stop your audience sticking pins in their eyes by the mid-afternoon break.

Work experience: but not as you know it

We’re looking for second-year undergraduates to come to our free two-day Word Experience workshop on Thursday 26th and Friday 27th March 2015 at our London HQ.

What’s ‘Word Experience’?

We get a lot of requests from people wanting to come on work experience. But we’ve always felt work experience was pretty unsatisfactory all round: we can’t help many people in a year; you inevitably end up doing quite a bit of boring stuff; and, if we’re honest, it’s a lot of work to do well. (And who wants to do it badly?)

So we cooked up Word Experience: every year, we gather about 20 people together for two days of creativity, workshops and fun stuff. Along the way we’ll talk to you about how you can make a career out of writing for business, show you how our agency works, and some Writer folk will tell you their own stories of how they got into business writing. We might even get you working with us on a live project.

Plus, we usually pick two people from each year to come back and join us for a short paid internship. (And some of those have ended up working here.)

Here’s what previous Word Experiencers have said

‘I loved every minute of it! The look into the world of business writing was insightful and I’ve come away with two realisations: A) You can make a living from words, without becoming a journalist, and B) I actually have a bankable skill set.’

‘Hands-on activities included the sorts of word games that seem like harmless entertainment while you do them, but come loaded with Karate Kid-style moments of realisation that detonate later on. The other day I was struggling over an email to a tutor, then something clicked and (wax on, wax off) I realised I could cut out half the words to make it cleaner and clearer. Who knew writing poems about Ryan Gosling and Tweets for a bike charity could lead to that?’

Keep reading if:

You already write for your course

Maybe you study English, journalism or creative writing. Or maybe you just write a lot of essays.

You write in your spare time too

You might write for your student paper, a blog, or fiction. It doesn’t matter as long as you write.

You’re a bit of a word geek

You have a tendency to get excited or properly riled up by all kinds of writing. From tube ads to tubes of toothpaste, Booker Prize winners to Charlie Brooker.

Yes that’s me. What do I need to do?

Send us 300 words telling us why we should pick you (and a way for us to get in touch with you) to pickme@thewriter.com. Make sure ‘Word Experience’ and your name are in the subject line. And get it to us by Sunday 1st March 2015.

Every culture in the world has idioms, some of which translate almost literally into English.

In Swedish, if something has fallen through the cracks, they say det föll mellan stolarna (‘it fell between chairs’). And in German, someone lacking in subtlety is like ein Elefant in einem Porzellangeschäft (‘an elephant in a…’ you can probably guess the rest).

But as that list shows, an awful lot don’t.

In Russia, people don’t pull your leg, they hang noodles on your ears. In Thailand, if two people know each other’s secrets, the hen sees the snake’s feet and the snake sees the hen’s breasts. And if you take the fall for something in Portugal, you pay the duck.

(If you write for an audience who aren’t all native speakers, you might be told to steer clear of idioms for their sake – which is fair enough. But you risk losing a lot of personality when you strip them out. So make sure you think about how you can add that back in some other way.)

Aside from making trouble for foreigners, idioms also tell us something interesting about the way we use language.

The fact that they’re so common around the world suggests they’re crucial to how we communicate. (Our pal Steven Pinker says we know as many idioms as we do common words in his book The Stuff Of Thought.)

But isn’t that odd, when the definition of an idiom is ‘a phrase whose meaning isn’t clear from the words in it’? Why do we spend so much time using language deliberately designed to be illogical?

Because the way we communicate doesn’t rest just on logic. If you want to persuade, cajole, encourage or inspire someone, reason alone won’t cut it. We’re illogical beings. Idioms add flavour – they conjure images and evoke emotion, and connect with people in a way that plain speaking doesn’t.

If you want to convey someone’s depth of feeling, do you say they reacted angrily, or that they hit the roof?

Is it more evocative to say something’s early in the morning, or at the crack of dawn?

We use idioms all the time precisely because they’re rich in imagery, and we instinctively know they connect with people on an emotional level. And as we’ve said all along: if you don’t do that with your words, you’re combing the giraffe*.